This was closely followed by Bollywood giant Shah Rukh Khan’s tweet, which featured a picture of himself with former One Direction star Zayn Malik. That message was viewed over 18 million times and received 141,000 retweets.

India’s massive influence on Twitter is clear to see in APAC, with eight of the top 10 most followed people in the region from India. The fastest riser in that crowd is prime minister Narendra Modi.

By using social media to grow his popularity and connect with both world leaders and ordinary citizens, he gained 12 million followers since becoming prime minister in May 2014 and is the second-most followed world leader on Twitter, behind president Barack Obama.

The Cricket World Cup in Australia generated more than 1.4 billion impressions of tweets over its six-week programme, while an unlikely hashtag from the Philippines broke a Twitter record.

The AlDub fictional TV couple, who are part of the daytime TV show Eat Bulaga, have been a social media phenomenon.

Actors Alden Richards and Yaya Dub set the record for number of tweets for a TV show – 41 million - when they hosted the ‘Tamang Panahon’ concert, through the hashtag #AlDubEBTamangPanahon.

The concert was broadcast worldwide and the hashtag was the third most popular TV tag globally on Twitter.